The Road to En-dor

by E. H. Jones

  Figure 6: Freeland drew a poster for me.

  The development in the Hospital House had another result. My little ‘rag’ was assuming larger proportions than I had intended, and as often happens in this funny old world, circumstances were beginning to tie me up. I could not now confess without giving somebody else away at the same time as myself. Besides, I did not very much want to confess. The ‘conversion’ of a large portion of the camp was in sight, for Doc. was quite right in his analysis of the situation, and the entry of Bishop and Nightingale on the scene had disposed everybody to further enquiry into the matter. The position was beginning to have a keen psychological interest for me.

  So I compromised with my conscience. Freeland drew for me a fitting poster – a picture of a spook-glass and board, and beneath it I placed a notice which said that ours was the original Psychical Research Society of Yozgad, that it had no connection with any other firm, and that we held séances on stated evenings. Our fellow prisoners were asked to attend. The closest inspection was invited. The poster ended by saying that the mediums each suspected the other and would welcome any enquirer who could decide how the rational movements of the glass were caused. Muscular action, thought transference, spiritualism and alcoholism were suggested to the camp as possible solutions.

  Shortly after this notice was put up, Doc. and I were asked if we objected to a series of ‘tests’. Doc., strong in his own innocence, welcomed the suggestion. As for me, it was exactly what I wanted – the raison d’être of my notice. Up to now it had been ‘a shame to take the money’. This put us on a reasonable basis. If all were discovered, as I expected would be the case, I’d get my poshing, there would be a good laugh all round, and that would be the end of it. If by any fluke of fortune I survived, the testers would only have themselves to blame afterwards. It was now a fair fight – my wits against the rest – catch as catch can, and all grips allowed. Neither the Doc. nor I made any conditions, nor did we want to know beforehand the nature of the tests to which we were to be subjected.

  But I took my precautions. I secretly nicked the edges of the circle on which the letters were written in such a way that I could always recognize, by touch, the position of the board.

  Chapter III

  How the Mediums Were Tested

  There was an empty room that formed part of the passage-way between the two portions of the Upper House. It was insanitary, draughty, and cheerless. It had an uneven brick floor of Arctic coldness. The view from the broken-paned, closely-barred window was restricted to a blank wall and a few ruined houses. Here, in the early days before the Turk increased our accommodation, five unhappy officers of the Worcester Yeomanry had learned the full bitterness of captivity. They were not very big men, but when they were all lying down on the floor together (as they usually were, poor devils) there was barely space to step between them, which shows the size of the room. Of its general undesirability no better proof is wanted than that it remained uninhabited after the ‘Cavalry Club’ had found better quarters. One thing only would have induced anyone to take up his dwelling there – the hope of privacy. But the room was not even private. It was a thoroughfare, the only means of getting from the northern to the southern half of the house.

  It was not allowed to remain quite idle. Its dirty ‘white’-washed walls, brushwood ceiling, broken windows, and uneven floor saw the birth of many schemes for alleviating the monotony of existence in Yozgad. Here was rehearsed our first Christmas Pantomime – The Fair Maid of Yozgad – which is perhaps unique amongst pantomimes in that it had to be performed secretly, at midnight, after the guards had done their nightly round. For in it Holyoake and Doffing had given full rein to our feelings towards our captors, and it would not have been polite – or judicious – for ‘honoured guests’ to have expressed themselves quite so freely in public. Here Sandes’ orchestra of home-made instruments used to hold their practices, which caused a keen student of Darwin to vow he had no further interest in one branch of evolution – that of music. Here ‘Little, Stoker & Co.’ made their gallant attempt to start an illicit still, and here, finally, the ‘Spook’ took up his abode.

  The tests were spread over several evenings. I can only give brief samples of what occurred. When Doc. and I sat down to the table we were the centre of a little crowd of spectators and ‘detectives’, for there was nothing secret about the séances.

  ‘Bandage the beggars for a start,’ somebody suggested. Handkerchiefs were tied round our eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Alec.

  The glass began to move about. I was writing rubbish. Some sceptic laughed.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Price. ‘It always begins like that. Now who are you?’

  ‘S-I-double L-Y, Silly!’ the sceptic read out. ‘That’s rather a poor shot for “Sally”. The bandage affects the Spook, it seems.’

  ‘A-S-S,’ the Spook went on. ‘I-T M-A-K-E-S N-O D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-C-E.’

  ‘We’ll see!’ said the sceptic. I felt the board being moved under my hand. ‘Now who are you?’

  As the glass circled under my right hand, I felt for and found the secret nicks with my left thumb.

  ‘U T-H-I-N-K U A-R-E C-L-E-V-E-R.’

  Slim Jim was lounging about the room. He was Doc.’s prize patient and was at that time afflicted with the enormous appetite that follows a long bout of dysentery and fever.

  ‘Poses as a thought-reader, does he?’ he said. ‘Here! What am I thinking about?’

  ‘Your dinner,’ said the Spook, and everybody laughed.

  And so on. Mistakes were made, of course, and the glass frequently went to ‘next-door’ letters, but not more so than on ordinary occasions. It became generally accepted by the company that whether the mediums had their eyes bandaged or not, and whether the position of the board was altered or not, it made no difference.

  Once, when the board was moved, my questing thumb failed to locate the nicks! I was in a quandary, for I dared not feel openly for the guiding marks. But I got my position in another way. The glass began to bang away at one spot.

  ‘Right,’ said Matthews. ‘Get on.’

  Still the glass banged away at the same letter.

  ‘All right, I’ve got that one,’ Alec repeated.

  But the glass paid no attention. It continued the monotonous tapping.

  ‘Looks like doing this all night,’ I said. ‘It’s getting wearisome. Curse it a bit, someone.’

  ‘Leave that damned “D” alone!’ said an obliging spectator.

  ‘-O-N-T S-W-E-A-R,’ the Spook went on at once. We had got our bearings again.

  One evening some fiend – I think it was Holyoake – suggested turning the circle with the letters face downwards, a number being written on the back of each letter. The numbers touched were to be noted down, and any message given was to be deciphered afterwards. The inversion was made and it gave me furiously to think. The problem would have been easy enough had it merely meant a reversal of all the motions of the glass – i.e., if all the letters were diametrically opposite to their usual stations, as happened when the board was merely twisted round a half-revolution. I was accustomed to that; but this was different. Take an ordinary dinner-plate. Mark the points of the compass on it. Now, for the sake of clearness, revolve the plate on the axis of the north-south line, and turn it face downwards. The north point is still in the same position. So is the south point; but while east has changed places with west, north-east has become not south-west but north-west; east-nor’east has become not west-south-west but west-nor’west, and so on. Given time, I could no doubt have worked out the position of each letter as I came to it, and moved the glass with fair accuracy. But to have altered the usual rate of movement would have aroused suspicion. The glass must move at the usual pace, or not at all; but how to do it? My memory had created for itself a picture of the board. Given any one letter, I could visualize the positions of the rest almost automatically, and my hand could guide the glass to them with as little conscious effort as a
pianist, given his C natural, finds in hitting the right keys in the dark. Imagine the state of mind of a musician who finds the C natural in the usual place, but the bass notes on his right and the treble notes on his left!

  Opposite me the Doc. sat. He had nothing to trouble him, no problem to work out. His one task in life was to let his hand follow the movements of the glass, to wait for it to move, and then neither hinder nor help but go whither it led. To him it did not matter where the letters were – they might be upside down or inside out for all he cared. The Spook would take him there. He breathed easily, in the serenity of a full faith, while the glass moved slowly round and round and I thought and thought and thought. I tried hard to construct in my mind a looking-glass picture of the board, and failed. To give myself time I worked out the positions of the N and the O, and for a spell answered every question with a ‘No’. Then all of a sudden the solution flashed into my mind. After all, I was the Spook. There was, therefore, no reason why I should not, like every other decently educated spook, be able to see things through a table, or any other small impediment of that sort. Instead of imagining myself to be looking down at the board from above the table, I only had to imagine myself to be looking up at the board from below the table to have everything in its right position once more. In thirty seconds the glass was writing as freely as ever.

  I do not think my friends ever realized the difficulty of the task they had set me, or how near we were that night to failure. Certainly I got no credit for the performance. For I, like the Doc., was only a medium. The credit went where it belonged – to the Spook.

  ‘You birds satisfied?’ asked the Doc. genially, as he leaned back in his rickety chair, smoking a cigarette after the trial. ‘How long are we going to keep up this testing business? Seems to me the Spook has had you cold every time. For myself, I’d like to get on to something more interesting.’

  ‘So would I,’ said I, and I spoke from the bottom of my heart. ‘The position seems to me to be this. Either Doc.’s fudging, or he’s not, and –’

  ‘I tell you I’m not,’ said the Doc. emphatically.

  ‘Some of us don’t believe you,’ said I; ‘that’s why they are testing you.’

  ‘Blow me tight! They’re testing you as much as me! I know nothin’ about it!’

  ‘Well, put it this way: either we are fudging or we are not. Will that satisfy you, Doc.?’

  ‘The way I’d put it,’ said the little man, ‘would be – either you are puffin’ our blooming legs off or we’ve struck a sixty-horse-power, armour-plated spook of the very first quality. An’ faith, I wouldn’t put it past ye – ye vagabond!’

  ‘Right-o!’ I laughed. ‘Assume I’m fudging. What does it mean? You’ll admit I’ve been properly blindfolded?’

  ‘We do,’ said Matthews and Price together.

  ‘I know I was,’ grumbled the Doc., rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Therefore it must have been memory work. D’you think you can remember the position of all the letters on the board without looking at them?’

  ‘Sorra a wan!’ said the Doctor.

  ‘I believe I could,’ said Matthews.

  ‘Well, shut your eyes and try to push the glass to them,’ I suggested.

  Matthews sat down. He started well, but he had no guide except his own general position and soon went hopelessly astray. ‘It would need a lot of practice,’ he said.

  ‘Seen me practising, any of you?’ I asked.

  ‘We have not,’ said the Doc., ‘an’ what’s more we know you haven’t got the patience for it. Besides, you couldn’t have told us all these things we’ve had out of the board.’

  ‘The thing that knocks the memory theory on the head,’ said Price, ‘is the fact of the board being moved about after you were blindfolded. No amount of memory would help you if you couldn’t see.’

  ‘I couldn’t see – I didn’t even try,’ I answered with perfect truth.

  ‘Besides, you old ass,’ Price went on with a grin, ‘we know you forget your tie as often as not, and you forgot your lines at the Panto though you’d only about five, and you nearly left out the Good Fairy’s song altogether.’ He began to laugh. ‘The idea of accusing you of having a memory, Bones, is too blessed ridiculous for words. It’s worse than believing in the Spook.’

  ‘You needn’t rub it in,’ said I. ‘If I did not remember my exact lines at the Panto I made others just as good. I haven’t got a blooming photographic snapshot camera of a memory like Merriman’s, but it’s as good as my neighbour’s, anyway.’

  By now they were all laughing at me. I quoted poetry I had learned at school to prove I had a memory. They only laughed the more.

  ‘What’s the day of the week?’ the Doc. asked suddenly, as if he had forgotten an engagement.

  ‘Hanged if I know,’ said I. It was easy for a prisoner to forget the day of the week.

  ‘There ye are, ye see!’ said the Doc., and they all jeered, loud and long.

  They agreed it could not be done by memory.

  ‘Can you think of any other way of fudging it?’ I asked.

  They could not.

  ‘Then if it is not my memory it must be yours, Doc.’

  ‘What’s the good of sayin’ it is me when I’m tellin’ ye it’s not,’ said the Doc. wrathfully. ‘You are as bad as the worst sceptic in the place. I couldn’t do it if I tried, nor could the best man among you. It can’t be a fudge! Look the facts in the face and admit it!’

  ‘I don’t see how it can,’ said Matthews. ‘We must look for some other explanation – telepathy, or subconscious communication, or something of that sort. That’s the next problem.’

  ‘We are getting on,’ I said.

  We were. But not in the sense they imagined.

  Advanced investigators of spiritualism are like sword-swallowers. They can take in with ease what no ordinary mortal can stomach. For in matters of belief, as elsewhere, ‘il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute’. It is all a matter of practice and experience. We in Yozgad had not yet acquired the capacity of an Oliver Lodge or a Conan Doyle, but we were getting along very well for beginners. The stage of ‘True-believerdom’ was in sight when my little flock would cease from talking about ‘elementary details’ and concentrate their attention on the ‘greater truths of the World Beyond.’ Once a medium has been accepted as bona fide he has quite a nice job – as easy as falling off a log, and much more amusing. Experto crede!

  The growth of a belief is difficult to describe, for growth is not a matter of adding one piece here and another there. It is not an addition at all, it is a process; and the most that can be done in describing it is to state a few of the outstanding events and say, ‘this marks one stage in the process, that another.’ But the process itself does not move by jerks. Nor is it the sum total of these separate events. In any investigation each point as it is reached is subjected to proof. Once passed as proved it forms in its turn part of the foundation for a further advance in belief. It is the part of the investigator to make certain he does not admit as correct a single false deduction. If he does the whole of his subsequent reasoning is liable to be affected.

  It is particularly easy, in a question like spiritualism, to allow fallacy to creep in. There is a basis of curious phenomena which certainly exist and are recognized by scientists as indubitable facts. But the investigator must be careful, in every instance, to assure himself that he is in the presence of the genuine phenomenon, and not of an imitation of it, and, as a matter of fact, this is sometimes impossible to do. Thus there is no doubt that the glass will move without the person whose fingers are resting on it exercising any force consciously. In the early days of honest experiment, we had satisfied ourselves on this point. It was within the experience of all of us. Many of us (I myself was one) could move it alone, without conscious effort; and before long we came to expect the movement to take place, and to regard it as the natural consequence of placing our hands in a certain position. When I began to move the glass consciously
there was no outward indication that any change had taken place, and nobody could prove I was pushing it rather than ‘following’ it. Nevertheless, the investigators were no longer in the presence of the genuine phenomenon, though they thought they were.

  From the knowledge that the movement of the glass could be caused by an unconscious exercise of force, to the belief that the rational movement of the glass was caused in the same unconscious way, was but a little step. It is a step which many eminent men have taken after years of patient investigation. My friends could hardly have been blamed had they taken it at once. The fact that they saw fit to test the ‘mediums’ and failed to discover the fraud does not prove they were fools. It does show that at least they were moderately careful, and it should be noted that the reasoning by which they led themselves astray was well based on facts. The trouble was it did not take into consideration all the facts that were relevant. They argued: ‘We ourselves moved the board round. The only means by which we could tell the new position of the letters was by looking. Bones was blindfolded. He could not see. Therefore he could not know the new position of the board.’

  The relevant fact omitted was that man possesses the sense of touch as well as of vision. It was a failure of observation as well as of logic. They should have watched my left thumb.

  Then, as corroboration, they argued: ‘It is notorious Bones’ memory failed him at the Pantomime, and on other similar occasions. Therefore Bones has a bad memory. No man with a bad memory could carry in his head the position of twenty-six letters. Therefore Bones did not do so’ – which neglects the fact that stage-memory is a thing quite apart and by itself.